HOMER & LANGLEY
E.L. Doctorow
Random House
Fiction
ISBN: 9781400064946
We Americans are inveterate collectors of stuff. In fact, as a recent article in the New York Times Magazine reported, we are so skilled at accumulating possessions and need so much additional space to stash them that there are 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space in this country. In his latest novel, E.L. Doctorow, the brilliant fictional chronicler of American history in novels like RAGTIME, THE BOOK OF DANIEL and THE MARCH, eloquently reinvents the story of the real-life Collyer brothers, exemplars of that trait of acquisitiveness and the way it can drift into pathology.
In March 1947, New York City police removed from a four-story brownstone on Fifth Avenue the bodies of two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, the reclusive, sixtyish sons of a prominent gynecologist. As a crowd of gawkers numbering in the hundreds looked on, the authorities eventually disposed of more than 100 tons of rubbish accumulated in years of obsessive hoarding. That’s the spare framework on which this skillfully imagined novel is erected.
Deftly liberating the Collyers’ story from the historical record, Doctorow moves their home to a different location on Fifth Avenue, reverses the brothers’ birth order and toys with other biographical details. Most dramatically, he has Homer and Langley surviving deep into the 20th century, long enough to experience the invention of television, the moon landing and the Vietnam War, as they open their home to a group of hippies who take up residence after an antiwar protest in Central Park. The panorama of that century unfolds, paradoxically, through the lives of these recluses. Time passes, and like the massive collection of objects growing inside, its detritus washes up against the shore of the Collyer home.
Homer and Langley are both damaged men --- Homer, who gradually lost his eyesight as a teenager, and Langley in a mustard gas attack in World War I. It would have been easy for Doctorow to portray them as a pair of cranks, as the real Collyers appeared when they first attracted the notice of their contemporaries. Instead he has given both, especially Homer, the narrator of the novel, rich and complex interior lives.
Langley, cynical and calculating, purchases every edition of each day’s New York newspaper, clipping and filing stories in an effort to create some Platonic ideal of the ultimate newspaper. “He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition,” Homer writes of his brother, “what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need.” Of course, he observes drily, “It was a big organizational problem for him to cull from years of daily newspapers the signal episodes and kinds of activities that are timeless.”
Homer’s sightless existence is not without its compensations. There’s the music he plays on his beloved Aeolian piano and the women who drift in and out of his life; he beds several of them, but one, a young woman he came to know while playing piano in a movie theater, remains elusively out of reach and haunts his dreams for years.
With seeming inevitability the trash piles higher, portrayed in this partial description of the contents of the backyard: “an old refrigerator, boxes of plumbing joints and pipes, mill-bottle crates, bedsprings, headboards, a baby carriage with missing wheels…a real fire hydrant, automobile tires, stacks of roof shingles, odd pieces of lumber, and so on.” Over time, Homer notes, “every room was becoming an obstacle course for me.” Describing Langley’s vast collection of Army surplus, Homer comments, “It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war.” But all of that pales alongside Langley’s decision to replace the dining room table with a Model T, whose engine he attempts to use as a generator to save on electric bills. Doctorow’s measured, almost offhanded, account of the claustrophobic environment into which Langley transforms their dwelling gradually takes on an hypnotic quality.
It’s tempting to question why Homer never objects to his brother’s self-destructive hoarding that in the end will doom both of them. Here, Doctorow’s novel shines in its depiction of the solicitude of one brother for the other. Langley resorts to home remedies in a vain attempt to cure Homer’s blindness. And when the pair are nearly entombed in their garbage-filled surroundings, Langley attempts to guide Homer through the maze of booby traps he has set and makes sure his ailing brother is fed. In the end, Homer poignantly observes, “We were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in.”
E.L. Doctorow has moved Homer and Langley Collyer from the sideshow of American history to center stage. Strange as their story may be, he makes us feel privileged, if in an odd way perhaps, to share it.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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